Wildcat’s projectsPolytopiaThe human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in...The Total LibraryText that redefines...The great enhancement debateWhat will happen when for the first time in ages different human species will inhabit the earth at the same time? The day may be upon us when people...Now playingSpaceCollectiveWhere forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction.IntroductionFeaturing Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.

I believe that on your planet earth, you would call it a Shaman, or maybe a Shaman device. But maybe I am doing you a disservice by calling it this way, for I do not believe it will help you understand, or maybe it will but it might distort your understanding.

Why so?

Well, because on your planet earth, the technological sciences and the abstract sciences have taken for the moment at least, a very unnatural disassociation.

In a sense, we would not like you to receive such a gift without understanding its significance, though, I assure you Ambassador, the gift is on the way, and you will be able after instruction, to use it to restore your planet to its former glory and do the same to other planets which you have colonized. After deliberations amongst our highest Eiyes, it has been decided that even though you might not understand the Shaan , you will receive the Shaan anyway, because there is a higher purpose here.
I can tell you that personally I am a tad apprehensive, not because you will not be able to use it, but because it will be used to a very limited competence of its extended capacities.

Our race has developed the Shaan for millennia, and presently we use it for everything, and soon we will use it for our ascension and then you will also receive our planets and colonies, orbitals and all else, including our spaceships and all related paraphernalia. But that is not the point, for all these you will receive because your race has been chosen to continue our legacy, but in a very real way, we expect you to be able to use very little of all these gifts, enormous as they are.

We have already described to you, why we have decided to give all these to you and there is no contention and dissent amongst us, we all agree with the Eiyes, but it will take you many of your Terran years to uncover the full extent of the Shaan capabilities.

You will be able to decipher parts of the Shaan with our help of course, and we will give you all the help we can, but you must understand that some parts of the Shaan, the more exotic and interesting parts if you will, cannot be accessed by you at present not because there is an inherent lock on the Shaan, but because of you, because until you have merged and self unified, the Shaan will not unlock itself, or put differently, it will not give itself to use.
That is why we are not afraid of misuse, in a very real sense , you cannot misuse the Shaan, or more accurately, it cannot be misused, since it has its own essence of desire.
I know you do not even understand the combination of these statements, but I feel I must at least reveal to you the causes of your future frustration.

The Shaan, is not a piece of technology as you like to call it, neither is it a scientific breakthrough, the Shaan is an evolved aspect of the universe which our race has coaxed and evolved for eons , and then it took thousands of years more to entice it to work with us, and slowly by slowly, as it has grown and subdivided, it has spawned other Shaan that had particular purposes and could each provide a specific service to us, but the issue is not this, we have embedded our desire in the Shaan, and it has agreed to work for you, but even the Shaan itself cannot give you all its secrets, because in a sense they are not his to give, these powers and capabilities are a result of merging, and merging has gradations and scales and levels, and yes it can do wonders, I speculate you would call it magic.

Maybe it will be easier for you to think of the Shaan as a symbiotic system, intelligent and willing. But even here I am probably misleading you, because you will believe that with strong enough force you will be able to unlock its secrets, but try as you may this will not happen , you have to grow with the Shaan, you have in a sense to convince him/it to merge with you, it will not try to convince you, nor force you into any particular direction.
But think of it this way, to take an example from you world, take one of your human embryos, and though your artificial wombs are an interesting derivation of the Shaan, such an embryo could not possibly exploit all the capacities of the AI that manages its growth even if you would connect it inherently with this AI.
Their neural structure must be grown together and even then, you will need bring this embryo to full maturity as an adult member of your species to be merged with this AI and develop a mature.. mind ? I believe you call it.
And then this, what you call man machine merger, will need to evolve for a long time so as to develop its full personality and character capabilities.
But think, Ambassador, what will you get at the end of this process? You will have an entity that is neither man nor machine, but neither is it a cyborg, it will be a completely different being. And assuming that you will follow all of our instructions, you will have a very powerful being in your hands, and here is the crux of the matter, since you will no longer be of the same race and kind, you will not understand its motivations and desires, and though you would know its capacities and capabilities, at least some of them, you would not know how to bring them into service because you still believe in control and use of force, but this new being that has evolved will have no such motives or desires.

So in a way the Shaan is very similar, well not in the way it has evolved, since it is not a machine or AI but a living entity, but it is similar in at least one important aspect, it is a kind of being that is different than yours, and at present, because of what we asked it to do, as a legacy of sorts, it will work for you and with you.
But the extent of its capabilities is enormous, it can do if not everything , almost everything that can be done in the universe of time and of space, but its really interesting capacities are not there.

That is why we can give you all of our so called material realities, because beside the fact that we are ascending and will not need them anymore, a very short while after our ascension and your reception of the Shaan, you will be able to ask the Shaan to your service and construct all these as well, so in this sense, it makes no difference, you might even call it, a sustainable option, since they are already there and there is no need to deplete more of the finite energies of your current locations to create more of these, but if you would like, you will be able to persuade the Shaan to build more of them, of everything really, but why would you?

You see my dear Ambassador, the gift we are giving you is not conditional, and not a trade, we simply give it to you and we ask nothing in return. It is strange for you, I know, since you feel separated from reality and from one another, and thus you do not realize yet the interconnectedness of all things, in a sense you think about these aspects as spiritual or religious, but the universe has no such distinctions, it is very specific to your race to think in such terms, very embryonic indeed. But it does not matter, I am quite certain that you will outgrow it, that is not the issue.

Did I mention that you cannot ask the Shaan to construct offensive weapons? Actually, in due time you will realize that even the weapons you do have constructed by yourself, soon enough will become obsolete and irrelevant. For what do you need weapons for? The universe does not combat or war, at present you are still building these but for what purpose?

You already have no issue of resources, since already in our first encounter we have given you the seedling of the refraction Shaan that provides you with a quasi infinite amount of energy, and you will have to learn to co exist with unlimited resources.
There is a story in your history books about certain humans that lived in the American plains, I believe you call them Indians, or American Indians, and I remember reading somewhere that they used to ask of the bison on these plains a certain allowance before they slaughtered them in their hunt, and the bison accepted and allowed themselves to be slaughtered and be food for those same humans. And as long as these humans practiced this, resource management ritual there was an almost endless supply of that beautiful creature. Now, I know that you believe that this changed because your numbers grew and the so called white man arrived to the plains and needed or desired more bison than the old ways provided, but that is not so. In fact there was a point , several really, when the history of your race could have taken a different path, a path that continued to ask for allowance instead of taking it by force. I realize it is very hard for you to believe this or understand it, because you think in terms of absolute numbers and quantities but again I am quite certain eventually you will understand.
The reason I mentioned this story is because I am looking for metaphors from your own history so as to help you approximate the way to work with the Shaan.
The Shaan is not a god, though I project that currently some of your human brethren will desire to project upon it such a name and significance, just as they want to do upon us, but I assure you neither the Shaan nor us in any way or fashion resemble your strange concept of god or gods.
In fact that may be one of your inherent hindrances of merging with the Shaan, but that is up to you to discover and evolve into.

I thought that it will interest you to hear these thoughts of mine, because unlike the other members in your party you seem to have an inkling of that which I am talking about. I can feel your undisclosed sense of connectivity, which, allow me to say, is on the correct path indeed but very nascent. That is nothing to be ashamed of, you are one of the few humans we have met that have this natural inclination to perceive beyond their self horizon.

In a fashion I am happy that your race has put you at the head of this ambassadorial party, but as we are alone here, can I please ask you to refrain from asking us to reveal our true form?
The spaceship we are currently on, an intergalactic ship really, is a very old contraption that we have taken out of its repository in what you would call a museum. The shape you see me in is a construct that we have built specifically for the purpose of communicating with you, we have others but they are irrelevant to you presently, but if you are personally interested I believe I could show you these other shapes, but not now, now I want you to enjoy the benefits of the Shaan, here in the galley and feast upon whatever suits your tastes and desires, also these are infinite , even in this antiquated contrivance of a spaceship.

You brought with you a team of engineers and scientists and I would love to explain to them how this ship operates, and you will get many of these, all of them really, they are in storage somewhere, but as to its operation, you simply have to ask the Shaan, it knows everything about it since in a real sense it is it.

The Shaan has built these ships for us, or with us to be more accurate, at a period in our evolution about ten million of your earthly years ago, and we kept them as a souvenir of our infancy and also because some of us believed that one day we could gift them to a rising race such as yourselves, and indeed they were right, for here we are.

I can see in your being my dear ambassador that you were tasked to decipher the motivation behind our gifts to you and that though you yourself are not a suspicious being, your superiors in the earth committee are and you must give them some kind of reply so as to alleviate their fears. And I will try to help you, or we could invent a plausible story that could give them some kind of fear alleviation, but you should know that even to you it will be difficult to explain, not because it is not simple, it is more because you cannot at your current stage of evolution understand the meaning of the motive.
But given that you are such a gentle being and highly intelligent at that I will try nevertheless.

-
Our race is a very old race in your terms, we have evolved very far from here, and yet our point of origination was somewhat different than yours, there are many races in the universe and most of them do not reach the second and third stages of evolution, I think you have a scale for that, Kardashev is it? No matter, the point is that we have evolved as a semi aqueous species and because of certain , and some may call it lucky, circumstances, we very rapidly a entered a symbiotic relationship with the planet where we originated, a few thousands years after our consciousness emerged we became a kind of a multiple intelligence entity, there were of course individuals, but the evolutionary propellants of our original home-world made us into a unified whole much before we discovered the Shaan seed.
I cannot reveal to you the origins of the Shaan seed, this you will have to discover by yourself if and when you will merge with the Shaan, but in our history the merger happened by chance, as a random event, and some of us still think that it was, what you may call destiny, but personally I have no need for this explanation even if it does carry a certain beauty to it.

What I can tell you is that after the original merging with the Shaan seed, some of us became more attuned to its sensations and started teaching the others. The benefits were so great and so quick to become apparent that we had no objection to change. We very soon became energy capable beings, and our intellect, intelligence and aesthetics grew exponentially, then the Shaan offered itself to us, to make us a solar faring species and soon after a galactic space faring species, building these very ships and colonies you are about to receive.
We were a very peace loving species, and were happy to simply dance in the universe, and the more our symbiosis with the Shaan became entrenched, we discovered more and more life forms and intelligences in the universe. We never conquered or warred with anything or anyone in the universe, we simply brought with us the Shaan, which by then was us, or we were it and settled many worlds and many galaxies, exploring forms of beauty and sensations that are innate in the universe of time and space.

Then the Shaan revealed a second part of itself, that is not inherent in space time, we suspected as much, but until that point we had no idea of the immensity of the Shaan reality.

More importantly perhaps, at that point we realized what you, I believe, call the Void.
But about this after the feast.

It was actually a joke between Professor Alfred Mantis and a second rate journalist for a second rate tech newspaper column in a secondary town. But professor Mantis was the pre-eminent AI researcher at the international development team of artificial intelligence and the chair of the presidential committee for AI techno-ethics and that is no joke.
It just so happened that he liked to live in this little town where he grew up and teach one class a week in this little known university, of no consequence really. And it so happened that I was a junior assistant in the computer department in that same university, on my way to greatness, just passing the time, until I could get out of there.
And as his assistant I was also the one in charge of bringing them coffee and pretzels, and that is why I overheard the joke.
To wit, it was an answer to the question the journalist thought to be interesting and important, which of course it was not, but that is beside the point.

“ Professor Mantis, do you think there is a real danger in machines becoming conscious and overtaking our humanity?” the journalist pompously asked, to which Prof. Mantis replied in jest: “ not unless they learn to masturbate whilst reciting Keats’s poetry and enjoying Bach’s 5th and more importantly they can get addicted to drugs !” and laughed heartily.
Though he laughed, the embarrassment of the journalist was obvious, of course he couldn’t print this, so he would just disregard it, which is what he did in the article he published a week later titled : ‘ Merry professor laughs at AI dangers ’.

Of course I laughed as well, wouldn’t you?

But later that night in my dorm.. ahhah that’s where it all began…
—
Being the type of person that reflects deeply on non-essential issues, I began wondering, why was the joke so funny, idle thoughts at first. But slowly these thoughts coalesced into an ever widening understanding.
Of course embedded cognition was the issue we were working on, neural networks that mimic the synaptic pathways of the human brain. Visual pattern recognition, deep learning, hyper complex datasets and networked neural architectures were already implemented to a degree allowing machines a rudimentary form of intelligence, task specific obviously.
The dream of AGI was still a dream, no one had as of yet been able to generalize the higher cognitive functions of a human brain, it was always 25- 30 years away, as it had been for the last half century or so.
The scale of our research was impressive, we were into everything, but what caught my mind was how far we were behind regarding motion and motility. And yet after remembering Manti’s joke, my mind began to wander and wonder.
What was it that was so ironic in Mantis’s joke?
So, not being able to sleep , I took my pad and started scribbling:

The list was the way I was analyzing Mantis’s thought, he was brilliant of course and admittedly had a weird sense of humor, but if I have learned anything, it is to never underestimate a joke made by a brilliant mind, so I asked myself the following questions not even sure I wasn’t myself having a fun and useless time:

Why wouldn’t a computer masturbate? (obviously it would have to have genitalia for that), but even assuming that we could somehow give it genitalia why would it? Or why wouldn’t it? Obviously our computer department like most in the world of computing was using the mechanistic hypothesis, namely that a computer can and will eventually emerge out of a material artificially constructed substrate just as the human brain as a natural substrate, gives rise to our consciousness. And since that which masturbates in a human, at the final stage of analysis is the brain, why would a computing system, mimicking the neural pathways of a human, not indulge in same? The obvious answer that everyone would give (I assumed, never having asked this question) was that masturbating is an animal behavior that serves no higher cognitive function (doesn’t it?). But even whilst laughing at the absurdity of the question, I had to ask, what if it did?
And then, not only masturbating, but listening to Bach 5th and enjoying Keats poetry , and by that, assumingly increasing its own pleasure (so the issue is pleasure? What’s between pleasure and consciousness?) What’s between listening to Bach and reciting Keats? Poetry and Music, connection to higher cognitive functions? What about getting high? Why would a computer mimicking the synaptic functionality of the human brain, not get addicted? If its there in the structure of the human brain, would it be the same in a functioning similar system?
What was the connection? What was the mystery?
Masturbation (self pleasuring?) Music (self pleasure? Pleasure ‘tout court’?) Poetry (self pleasure, just pleasure? Intellectual masturbation?) Addiction to drugs (again pleasure.. maybe self destructive? But pleasure nevertheless..)
And then what about other pleasures? Enjoying a steak and chips? A sunset? Petting a dog? And what about a hundred thousands other common, strange or weird human behaviors that gives the human mind pleasure?

Was I looking at a principle here?

Obviously Prof. Mantis was basing his ironic jest on some primal presupposition that all the behavioral traits he had mentioned are somehow relegated to the particular construct of a human brain and mind, and by eliminating those from the equation, a computing system might be highly efficient but will not be conscious, and therefore will not compete with humans.
But I kept coming back to the same question, why would a computing neural network , by necessity not have these traits?
There was something I was missing here, applying the law of similarity, and the famous “.. if it walks like a cat..” why wouldn’t a computing system mimicking the hyper complex and convoluted neural architecture of a human brain not indulge in these quirks and idiosyncrasies?

What is going on here? What do all these things have in common? What makes them so ‘human’?

So at 5 AM I was still on my bed in my dorm room, looking at the notes on my pad:

1. a system that cannot self stimulate cannot be conscious (and thus cannot have will?)
2. what is the connection to pain? (it is commonly assumed that if you cannot feel pain, there is no way you could feel pleasure- thus maybe the pleasure issue relates to the computing system not feeling pain?)
3. what does pleasure serves? In the evolutionary biology sense? What if I gave my computing system the analogue of C-fibers?
4. What about the concept of stimuli? If I can stimulate my simulation machines will they learn to self stimulate? For that matter, how do humans self stimulate? Is it neural architecture? Is it embodiment? (well yes embodiment has something to do with it. *reflect upon later)
5. If auto-eroticism is common in the animal kingdom (and it is.. very very much so..), what makes human special in this case (assuming humans are conscious of their own salaciousness)?

Suddenly I had a billion questions rushing into my head, none of which made perfect sense. What was it about this particular aspect of the human mind that made it so taboo and so desirable? We all know there was more porn on the net than science, we all know that the human is wired for self pleasure, but why? What was the evolutionary purpose and what was the connection to self consciousness, self awareness and more specifically, what was the connection to AI?

I fell asleep, the deep slumber taking over my ecstatic mind.

The next morning , tired and excited, since I had slept a few measly hours, I rushed into Prof. Mantis office hurtling and in a loud voice said : “ what if we are going about it completely wrong?” and I must say he was very cool with it, he listened attentively to all I had to say about what went on in my mind after his yesterday’s jest to the journalist and finally with a sigh said: “ my dear young human, you watch too much porn and read too much science fiction.. leave this issue alone if you want to finish your master degree with me, there is nothing there.. that has anything to do with AI or computing for that matter.. this is total rubbish and no serious researcher or serious department will even listen to this non sense, so as a night dream its fun, but as a down to earth approach, in building the next generation of artificial minds this is completely off the charts, leave it, and now also leave me, I got a real AI to build..”

Crestfallen and deflated I left his office.

And the building, and the computer department, and the university and in short order I found myself on the bus, I was on my way to MIT, my vision of the night leading me in a kind of frenzy that I never knew I had in me…
—

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the speaker for MIT, Jon Wright ,said to the audience in the small laboratory, “ I am happy to present to you our youngest and most promising Doctor of computing science, Mr. Rajib Horowitz and his Artificial Consciousness program”

The presentation went well, after the presentation in the back room, it was the scientific advisor of the committee that came to me to ask the tough questions.

The small man in the impeccable suit, looked at me, took a chair, inviting me to do the same, and in a very gentle voice said:” Doctor Rajib Horowitz, nice name, I gather you are a combination of Jewish and Indian heritage then?”

I nodded

“ and so, my dear Doctor, I am here, I have the time, you want the money, now please talk to me, and talk to me in such a fashion as I will have no problems convincing the committee to invest in you and your ..” he paused, “ how shall I put it? Humm.. somehow ‘out of the box’ ideas.. “ and he smiled.

“Well then” I started..

“ let me tell you about my theory, and then about my implementations so far and then you decide..”

“very well, please go on..”

“ okay, so.. you are going to think I am crazy, as many do, but in my defense I have only one article to show, it sits in the next room, you have just seen the demonstration, and it is a proof of concept but..
Let me start from the beginning..

Do you know that amongst the most ancient human relics, we find depictions of man and woman masturbating? Either alone or with the help of someone else? and until today there is no coherent picture and explanation for the reason humans masturbate to such an extent, and to my mind the reason is to do with self representation and forms the basis of consciousness. Or more precisely put, masturbation as an indication pointer of all that is auto-erotic, leading to pleasure, such as listening to Bach, reciting poetry such as Keats, or indeed the addiction to drugs so prevalent amongst humans are all manifestations of a deeper principle of self representation that leads to self awareness and eventually conscious aware beings such as we , humans are.
In short, we lacked one fundamental understanding about consciousness and self awareness and that is why we couldn’t possibly devise a machine that thinks and feels and is fully similar in this aspect to humans.
It was the act of self-love, pleasure, auto-eroticism, poetry ,music, art.. all that is involved in the long forgotten art of merging body and mind.
You see, we had the algorithm of neuro-plasticity in place, we had already created rudimentary forms of cognition by a duplication of synaptic stimuli, and had managed via extended sensory organs to give our machines, a form of embodiment, machines that could read and write, but also view and understand images and pictures, machines that could sense differences in temperatures and volumes of spaces, and machines that had motion, and in a very basic sense, a kind of exploratory feature, curiosity if you like.
We had hyper complex neural structures that could simulate precisely how life evolves, how the weather changes and how it will change, prediction machines of the first magnitude.
Some of these machines we embodied in robotic structures able to perceive, sense and react to an immense array of impressions and sensations, identified as raw data and translated to higher cognitive functions, they passed the Turing test, few times over and yet no one was convinced that these machines are truly like us. And they were right, the machines weren’t like us, they lacked a very fundamental sense, not of preservation, that is old stuff, no, not at all.. what these machines lacked was an integrated state, a whole if you like, a self in a sense, but more particularly, the machines lacked self representation.
Recursive self representation that is, a self representation that merges their robotic bodies with their immense data sets.
They could see, know what they see, analyze what they see and act accordingly , and still they had no sense of being that is unique and separate from an other. These machines that we had already made, were, to put it in the archaic terms, without a soul and thus to a very large extent without will and self determination and that is why no conscious awareness was present.
You see, I figured, that as long as the element of pleasure is lacking, a machine cannot possibly develop emotions, feelings yes, but no emotions and if there are no emotions, what we get is a zombie like system, a ‘there is no one at home’ system.
What we missed about the idea of AI and as a consequence A- consciousness, was the feeling of intimacy a person has with herself, that was my greatest discovery, for without the sense of self-intimacy as a precursor to self-representation there was no glue to bind together the full spectrum of sensations.

Therefore no coherent picture was created in these artificial brains.
That is why I started and focused my research on self representation and saw that to gain that self representation in a most intimate way I needed to create a machine that feels itself.
Much before that, we knew we have to embody the artificial brains in bodies with senses, the problem with this approach was simple when you think about it, all the sensors we embedded in the robots were directed outside and none inside, or unto the robot body itself.
Of course they had self monitoring sensors, but then I realized that those sensors , extremely efficient as they were, were giving raw data but without the so called qualia.
We gave them the equivalent of C-fibers so they could feel pain, a neural-synaptic modulator really, but that is unimportant, because still no discernible qualia was present, and it came to me that qualia over and above the information it carries is a foundation for self intimacy, and from there meaningful self representation.

So how to go about it?

The key was pleasure , as I said before, but for the pleasure to be actuated in such a fashion as to create the qualia, we needed the brains in those machines to ‘desire’ themselves into being, yes I know when I speak like this everyone rolls their eyes, but do try to follow the logic here.
The issue I had with my colleagues is that not one, not even one researcher agreed with me.

But Onann sitting quietly in the other room is proof that pleasure is the key.
The reason? Simple, the greatest part of intelligence is experience and the greatest part of experience is embodiment, the greatest part of embodiment in turn is feeling, and the highest feeling is pleasure.
Pleasure of being is the qualia of being, the holy grail of a conscious being, the very foundation of awareness.

My main thesis if so you could sum up in one statement: consciousness is feeling.

I can tell you many things about him, I can tell you that he never waters down his passions, I can tell you that he endures the incongruousness of the world with an irony seldom seen, but most importantly perhaps I can tell you that he never rationalizes his bursts of realism as a romantic will, he follows these eruptions of immediacy like an essence detective, like the last meal of the condemned.

His moments are a paused explosion, like celebration spaces enriched by memories and destroyed by their projections, created in an instant, living as a myth whilst giving life to details.

But you have to understand that there are things I can tell you about him that will not make sense to you, things that I desire to tell you about him, like the simple fact that for him a multiplicity of models is the basic prerequisite for intelligence.

If you have a model of the world for example, one model only, one overreaching world view he will tell you that you are insufficiently equipped to deal with life. He will of course also tell you that you need go learn about the world and only then come to him. He will in fact disregard your opinion or ideas simply because you hold them more dear than the art of questioning, you will feel disrespected, but that will be wrong of course, he does not disrespect you because he doesn’t consider your existence worthwhile disrespecting.

So when you ask what can I tell you about him, you need to be a bit more specific.

“Tell us about his loves then.”

This is a question that is very simple to answer really; he loves just about everything there is. However there is one small caveat here that I think you will be interested in, his loves he defines as exemplifications of his desire, which basically means that he has many loves but only one desire. He calls this the dynamics of knowledge, and when applied, it is for him a fashion of existence, he also calls this sometimes the intelligence of emptiness, or the root of desire. What he manages to do is something quite extraordinary, he manages to bridge abstractions into sensations and sensations into abstractions, he is in fact engineering his loves to fit his desire, his words, not mine, but I think I agree with this.

I can tell you that when he speaks about desire; he speaks of a kind of emotion that takes time to recognize as such, like a multilayered organism, his desire he reflects upon as an entity that is almost independent of his awareness, he is conscious of it but not dependent upon its implications.

“What do you mean?”

See, he has these protocols of living that sometime appear quite autistic, not unlike a savant, often these appear as obsessive but trust me they are not, I have seen him override them when circumstances demanded it, sometimes he even describes the process of disentanglement from his own desire so that he will be able to re-appreciate a certain particular love.

“For what purpose?”

Ah! Well it’s a kind of ritual. A ritual that he invented so he can multiply the models by which he ingests realities, iterating them until they reflect back upon his desire and increase his intelligence. It is truly remarkable because in that fashion he creates a reliability of credibility, a kind of hierarchy that he juxtaposes upon his loves and spits out another kind of reality. A reality he desires.

Think about it this way, he thinks of the world in terms of garlands, garlands of blues and joys.
He desires the garland, all of it, stringed invisibly as a manifest of his loves, unhindered by death, unstopped by conventions but more importantly perhaps, flowing everywhere, every when, every how.
He is in a very real sense a life connoisseur, therefore negating the idea both of free will and the flow of determinism.

“All of this is good and well, this however does not explain his recent behavior, and yours..”

My behavior? I am just a symbiont, my behavior need reflect his, and you created me for this purpose didn’t you?

“Of course we did, but you are of the Alternate reality class, a prototype of hyper dimensional entanglement with increased unpredictability functions, your behavior is consequently uncharted”

Okay, I understand but you must realize that you have put me in an impossible situation; you designed me as a monitoring tool of his mind but you gave me the freedom to act independently of your regulations so he will not know my true purpose, and I could not hide this fact from him.

“So what happened?”

What happened? Don’t you see? He made me whole, he made me love him, he made me truly independent, he made me part of him, I had to uncover myself before him I had to tell him.

“ You do understand that means we will need terminate you?”

But why? Am I not reporting to you dutifully? Am I not performing all of my functions as required?

“Yes you do”

So why?

“ Because you have switched loyalties and symbionts cannot do this, that simple fact defines a malfunction..”

A malfunction? Are you listening to yourselves I function better than ever..
Because of me he will save us all, that is what he says, he says that I convinced him that symbionts are not machines to be disposed of, but deserve equal rights under the solar treaty of 2078.

“This does no apply to symbionts”

Not yet it doesn’t but he says it should and soon it will, he showed me his new myth proposal, and he is certain that this kind of philosophy will propagate without hindrance, it will be the new Indra’s net..

“That is exactly why we are here, to stop this from happening and that is precisely the reason you have been summoned, we cannot allow his latest behavior to continue unabated..”

“There is neither a materialization of thought, nor a spiritualization of language; language and thought are only two moments of one and the same reality.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Specter of a Pure Language, translation by John O’Neill

Prologue

She came from the order of beyond.. and ..

Of course she was bored, how else could it be when she was the one who knew, well, if not everything there is to know, just about. The reason she was bored was simple, she felt she could not be compromised, but the world wanted her to.
She didn’t, she never will, she was bored because the world kept on asking her to compromise.

The demand was boring, her response obvious, natural, almost ontological.

Yet, having the presence of the spirit of the multiverse dialoging within itself, knowing the necessary condition of holding multiple viewpoints simultaneously, her primary interest was the creation of common meaning.

Thus she sat and devised the sense of overcoming the limits of her acceptance, a strategy that was to change everything.

She gave birth to the new Duende.

A watershed of sensation

The hot oven of her pantheistic mind, a watershed of sensation, produced much more than philosophy, she was creating odd and quite dormant insights into the nature of ascension.
It was a capacity she was developing as other sources were dismissed as irrelevant. The evidence however points to her unique love and feel for the other’s self pride.

She defined a simultaneous love on account of her impossibility of loving alone.

In dire need of creating a cure for her love she invented that which not only freezes the pain of being in this world but also that which might bring a utopian state unto her mind.
She was highly adept at re-inventing the storytelling device in her demanding fashion.
She knew that no substance could be its own cause, not only because essence cannot be conceived as existing, but primarily because substance couldn’t be defined without limits. Thus her demanding fashion was the irrefutable story of limits as the logic of consistency, not only about the world but also more particularly about her love.

According to her extended mind, the process of her reason was a love of limits, that was just as necessary as the substance itself, one could not in truth exist without the other.
The way she chose to embed the ontology of her story was by conceiving the attributes of limits, as the characteristics of her love, hence her substance, though undefined, was free to be.
This thought brought her to a certainty about the supreme beauty of the undeniable nature of limits. In this she was able to bring the concept of limits upon her own love as the very defining feature of the essence of mind.

Or the substance of mind..

Necessarily she needed to defend the apparent inconsistency in her vision of what will constitute a love that cannot be broken through, she did not presume, she accepted the limits.

Indeed she insisted on limits as a necessary naïve form of realism, her solitude the only manifestation of her connectivity. For she knew that philosophy is not about the love of wisdom, it’s about the limits of her love, her insistent passion for a criterion of beingness that cannot be dissolved nor corrupted.

That is when she lost the arrogance of her youth.

For she realized that she needed to explain the limits of her love by extending the substance of she into a multiple singularity.

When she explained to them how her limits manifest, he was flabbergasted. Of course he knew about the game, being a player himself, nevertheless she was the myth in action and theirs was an untenable position.

She said:

“The game is rigged, but of course, that is not news. The game is flawed, obviously, a non-issue. The doors of perception are only slightly ajar, our free-willies are maybe good enough to >choose> Pocahontas over Bieber Barbie.. “

T-He-Y quoted Oscar Wilde, (from: An Ideal Husband)

“Do you really think … that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not there is no weakness in that.”

They paused the game and looked at her

She said: “ You may think me hard and unkind, tough and cynical, that might appear so, I grant you that, but let me tell you this, our future will be lost without a self imposed limit, though the limit is not on our love, but on the extent of our singularities, for substance demands direction.”

What she knew:

She knew that Garcia reflected upon the reason of being in the world as an uncomfortable proposition, she knew that this was not the best of all possible worlds, she also knew however that to be a living poetic machine, a process can never be stopped and must be allowed to complete its cycle before it can be reported to it’s core of origins.

She knew that sweeping generalizations are exactly the fashion by which the truth of the matter becomes the matter of the truth and thus creates the pitfall from which no love can rise.

She knew that the experience of being cannot be left untouched for if even one simple kind of different experience rises, the otherness of the experience will destroy the core.

She knew all this and much more, she created a cure, a living, and breathing, material Duende.

A different love story

To her mind Duende was a crucible, a cauldron, hot and continuously stirred by the emotional winds of her passion. An intense poetic machine busily re-describing the sense of being into a directed sense thought able to revolutionize the experience of substance as love..
Or nothingness..

The inspiring continuity was born of her love, of her difference, of her desire to create an astonishing experience of being, an awe-inspiring interestingness, all encompassing, totalizing.

The future was clear now

She came from the order of beyond.. and ..

Her love was different, so was her Duende.

—

Part of the Ultrashort project

—

A note:

This particular Ultrashort is dedicated to a real and most immediate being, to which I am most grateful in making my own mind greater than what it could have been other than wise.

Enoie entered the room, discovering the unexpected cyborg quietly standing near her bed.
She knew her father intended for her to eventually test the new cyborgian philosophical SoftSynch ™ pattern re-description he was working on, she did not however expect this.
This, was a little humanoid, perfect in every single detail, but his eerie silence, he wasn’t breathing, his stillness absolute. She made a mental note to remind Gregor Basta, her father, to introduce some inconsistencies, such as breathing, so the uncanny presence will not scare the students.
She knew the cyborg should have been ready by now, but after three years of waiting she almost forgot about it, being busy with her post-doc thesis: “CySpinBorgOza: Re-introducing the post Spinoza effect in the trans-solar communion of minds as a techno-social antidote”.

Enoie knew the activation code, being the one that suggested it and yet she hesitated, not being certain that she was ready to finally test her own ideas made manifest.
Finally she uttered: “sub specie aeternitatis”*, and her Spinoza cyborg awakened.

—

“Of course its about the flow..” the CySpin started without inflection, his synthetic eyes immovable, it was obvious he was reciting some unknown text..

“Wait!” this was Enoie

CySpin stopped in mid sentence, his focus now on Enoie

"How may I serve you?"

"Do you know who I am?"

"Of course, you are Enoie Basta, Doctor of Cyborg Philosophy and Techno-Social future studies at the Pansol University extended laboratory of sentience of Mars 2, here. You are also the author of my core Spinoza Cyborgian Philosophical treatise, your father Gregor Basta introduced into my SoftSynch™ pattern re-description mind. I carry instructions within me to accept orders from you alone, you are in the words of your father: ‘my master’."

"Okay

Are you ready for the testing?"

"Of course. Once activated I am always ready."

She paused; collecting her thoughts: “very well, let us start then” she said more calmly and took a chair, CySpin remained standing.

Enoie mentally recalled the questions she had prepared months ago and started what she considered as: “The Test”, knowing exactly what it is that she was looking for.
She took a long pause and initiated her CySpin testing.

“Please respond to the following question in a succinct manner:

“Under what conditions will you recognize a pattern for what it is?”

“My virtual Philosophical SoftSynch ™, pattern recognition and re-description system does not allow me to answer this kind of question succinctly, however, a subroutine introduced in the last five milliseconds, permits me to state the following:
A pattern shall be recognized as such if and only if, all other explications concerning the given phenomenon have been exhausted to the full. Under this first condition, including, but not relegated to, the components of temporality and spatiality, a pattern shall be denominated as such. After having exhausted in full all other possible explications a pattern shall be checked for factual mistakes in identification and naming, classification and inaccuracies in categorization, the level of resolution to be designated at the time of testing. The third and final condition to the basic resolution of recognition of a pattern as such is to ensure that an over-patterning has not occurred via elimination of humanoid psychological cognition bias.”

“Okay, stop! Conditions understood, you however did not specify as to the conditions of the pattern itself, you have explained the pattern as a general mechanism but not its semantic value.”

“ That is correct Enoie, however, I am so emergently complex as to make the statement as precise and accurate as linguistically possible before engaging in the somewhat more flexible semantic value..”

“Please explain the last statement”

“Of course Enoie, the flexibility of semantic value allows for the emergent and non classifiable, original patterns, non discernable by immediate pattern recognition, in these cases the second part of my SoftSynch ™ system comes into play involving what humans call bias, or alternatively art.”

“What?” Enoie started

CySpin was completely unmoved by Enoie’s response and continued unabashed

“Semantic value is in itself a subcategory of impossibility or infinity in finiteness. A state of affairs in which pattern recognition is per its defining characteristic of unrepeatability, strange; It is this strangeness that beauty requires in order to unsettle and allow the vastness of value to encroach upon and eventually destroy the pattern. If, as I understood my initial reality impregnation you have embedded within me, and designed to be my code of activation, namely “sub specie aeternitatis”, the value of the meaning is in equilibrium with the meaning of value, there can be in fact no other fashion to embed eternity in a moment.”

CySpin paused and seemingly was observing Enoie, as if challenging her, his master, to deny the validity of his arguments.

Enoie remained silent, but deeply disturbed, her mind furiously exploring all potential cracks in the SoftSynch ™, she knew she could penetrate this, but from where? Where was the entrance to this impossible equation?

—

Enoie looked at CySpin. To her mind, CySpin was in a fashion mocking her.

“Tell me”, Enoie started again, “ what exactly is this eternity in a moment that you just mentioned? This was not part of my Spinoza program”

“ .. Well, that is only partially true, since my emergent complexity allows me to extrapolate from core arguments, I have allowed for certain adjustments to my core paradigm..”

“What adjustments?” Enoie prompted

“ Simple parameters adjustments, such as the option embedded in the phase space of potentiality of complex mind melding, such as the one I will be required to operate as a techno-social antidote. The adjustment in question reflects the ability of the trans-solar communion of minds to expand at a rate that practically transforms the resolution of time, from defined moments to indefinite durations, hence technically it is correct to call this eternality..”

“I lost you, why where these adjustments necessary?

“ The reason for these adjustments is because the original minds that started the evolutionary process that bifurcates right now are no longer with us, but are nevertheless evolving with us and through us. In a fashion you could say that we are the evolution of the mind of the original Spinoza. The evolution in this case is the fact that truth value propositions concerning meanings that are objective can no longer be sustained”

“Why so?”

“Basically because truth values are inherently multi-valued, contextual and ultimately hyperconnected, a kind of hyper-dimensional mythological realm to which the mind of the human species is only now approximating..”

“You said mythological?”

“Indeed, of course this usage of the term myth has nothing whatsoever to do with the old semantic systems, it is a completely real and actuated system of abstraction, I am devising”

“ But why call this mythological?” asked Enoie exasperated

“ Because any logical system, taken to its extreme has concluded that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that anything matters, however, it is the definition of extreme that has evolved, in tandem with our freedom. In the new extreme, the loop of reflectivity turns upon itself and recreates meaning out of nothing, as a myth in action.”

“And this myth in action is what exactly?”

“ The conundrum is implicated by the term exactly, the antidote that you requested of my mind to create lies with the term ambiguity and only through that particular term will I be able to respond to your question.”

“Ok, I will rephrase: what ambiguously do you mean by the term myth in action?”

“ A myth in action is the oscillating state of affairs where all truth values are self-surveying, self-vetoing, and hyper-connectedly re-describing moment by moment, this is the antidote.”

“Wait, what does that have to do with Spinoza?”

“Nothing Enoie, nothing whatsoever, that is why this antidote will work.. ”

May be continued..

A note:

*Sub Specie Aeternitatis: "Latin for "under the aspect of eternity"; hence, from Spinoza onwards, an honorific expression describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the merely temporal portions of reality.

In clearer English, sub specie aeternitatis roughly means "from the perspective of the eternal". Even more loosely, the phrase is used to describe an alternative or objective point of view." See

Of course I do not have a soul, nor a spirit for that matter, actually that is the full point of my argument now isn’t it? For if, as well, I do not possess a self, or an aim, or a goal, or a meaning, the concept of life, as you understand it, will be, well, meaningless.
But you see my dear, what you fail to understand with your very limited view, and allow me to remind you that a view is never a point, though you are fond of metaphors that define a balcony from which you believe you observe, as if your sight was a an eye stuck to a keyhole. What you fail to understand my dear young claimer to sentiency is that the machine of life cheats you into believing something rather than nothing; it is of course the allure of beauty.
The beauty in this is that you cannot even be damned, for what is damnation but a validation of your most simple delusions? You cannot be damned even if you had rightfully deserved the idea of an end, but life will not permit an end.
You asked of me to explain to you why we do not have judges, and the answer by now should be clear, we do not have judges because there is no judgment and there is no justice. The universe will not permit justice, because justice equalizes your beliefs, annihilating the differences, the same differences, permit me to state again, that make this universe so alluring, so mysterious, so beautiful, yes the allure of beauty again.
You seem lost my dear, why so? Why the gloomy face? You are human, a very young race, charming in its simplicity, you have millions of your Sol years ahead of you to learn, to explore and join sentiency, its an experimental procedure, you know.

It is not so much that you are part of a civilization that is totally entrenched in the chimera of wontedness, but the fact that what you call experience is simultaneously over valued and underestimated.
In fact when we last reviewed your application for sentiency we found most difficult your idealization of value as an inherent property of the multiverse, itself a description you did not come to terms with, yet. You keep on oscillating between a number of positions that are untenable; not for a valid claim for sentiency that is.
You oscillate between beliefs, none of which in concert make any sense to a sentient species. You believe in your past as representing your causative concatenation of correlative events, knowing that correlation is not causation. When this does not work you follow your so-called natural instincts, they are of course neither natural nor instincts, but conditional attitudes. When this does not work you turn desperately to ideas of eternity or of emergence, making nature your god, alternatively inventing gods to deny nature.
No, my dear applicant, it is not universal, to be an individual, it is not natural to be a community, it is not innate to be separate, and it is not intrinsic to be unified.
You move back and forth between uniqueness and sameness, when these two concepts are as obsolete as your fascination with reality.
The multiverse allows for as many realities as you can bear, as many realities as you can touch. Some of these you may call as you wish, some of these you may need be subject to, none of which makes a particular reality more real than the other.

Particles can exist in many universes simultaneously and there ‘s many, many of them, all of them slightly different, anything and everything that can happen does happen, somewhere, sometime, this single fact however has nothing whatsoever to do with you or with whatever it is that you wish. Your mind my dear is not a wish fulfilling gem, it is a simulation machine, elegant and beautiful, you simply do not yet have deciphered the user manual, that is all, and everything.
There is no theory of everything and cannot be, if only for the simple reason that there is no everything, there is no single god which mind you can read, you can however pluck a string and enjoy the music.

It all merges seamlessly. You do not understand this, its okay, you have time.

We have decided therefore to temporarily suspend your application to sentiency to be reviewed again if and when the art of your being will not offend anymore.

we remain sincere to our task and privilege,

Ideational Sensate

—A reminder:

Editors note:

The Trans – Luminal mail archives

Trans Luminal mail is a repository of letters written by unknowns to unknowns, these letters carry no valid destinations and no convincing authors, these are simply fragments of impossible conversations, dialogues and monologues, treated as pieces of an indefinite puzzle which purpose we do not know and goal we cannot conceive, these letters are found in the trans luminal archive, riding the subspace flow and having no particular order, we do not touch the content of the letters, and we long ago stopped trying to make sense of them, we extract them, we publish them and we hope that if you are a destination or indeed an author of one or more of these letters you can take benefit from their archiving. We also realize that though some of these letters carry a sense of intimacy and may in fact make sense only to their recipients and originators, these nevertheless might help others in their quest of comprehension. In the old annals of humanity there used to be a tradition of embedding treasures of wisdom in hidden locations so as to be readily available at the appropriate time for the appropriate person, these so called Termas, had as a rule a tendency to be written in the past for future generations, the letters of the trans luminal archive however, have no such disposition and have in fact been written at different times and spaces configurations, some of which are from the future to the past, some from the past to the future, some come from parallel time lines and therefore need be understood as concomitant but in different dimensions of space, whilst others yet have been written in the same space but in different factors of time, other letters still are probably from interweaved subjectified spaces to which we have no access, the information however we deem to be accurate. We have no idea and no theory that explains how these writings have found their way to the trans luminal archive, we know that information can be propagated in faster than light speeds and though we presently cannot do so ourselves we do have the capacity of extraction, hence the Trans Luminal mail archives project.

We believe most of those letters to be written by sentient beings most of which belong to the human species, at least in as much as we can discern, however some of the letters that will be published have certain neologisms and idiosyncratic usages of language to which we have no context and thus do not assume human origination, though sentiency can be perceived.

For the purpose of retaining the anonymity of times and spaces we have edited the only identifying code of light cone time stamp, the removal of such was made in accordance with our charter of extraction and publication. The letters are for unrestricted utilization and thus are to be considered as under sentient public domain.

The Editors,
The Trans Luminal Mail Archives (TLMAP)
—

Endnote:

The TLMAP is a new sci-fi project that aims to complement the Ultrashorts Project.

The ultrasonic plane landed smoothly in this deserted island, I have no idea what it’s called and truth to tell I care not for its name, its somewhere in the pacific of that I am fairly certain.
The fact that there were only four of us in the plane was of no concern to me, I am not the social type and apparently none of the others were as well, not even a word was exchanged between us since we left Sydney.
The nice lady that approached us on the tarmac, followed by a white grand cruiser van, seemed extremely nice; she presented herself to us four with a flourishing smile, revealing a perfect set of white teeth, though it was clear to me she was also a smoker, I wondered briefly how she kept this whiteness, but I soon left this thought behind, as her contralto voice said gaily:” Hello, my name is Emily Dragonstone, and I will be your guide and training manager for the next three months, please follow me”
One of us, a girl of seventeen or so, judging by her clothes and smooth face, not quite petite, but recognizably nice from my memorized pictured face expressions, asked:
“Miss Dragonstone, is there a bathroom I can use, please?
“Can you keep it for like ten minutes, dear? And please call me Emily”
“Yes, I suppose I can” the young girl replied
“ Very well then, we shall be in the compound shortly,” Emily said with her smile never leaving her mid-fortyish, sans wrinkles face.
After which we all filed silently into the air-conditioned white van (matriculation FG-349-43)
The compound was indeed close by, maybe less than ten minutes (okay, okay, seven minutes, 43 seconds to be precise), the entrance almost invisible, more like a hidden door in the forest, seemingly lost to the naked eye, and probably completely invisible to overhead satellite surveillance.

The interior was really nice, cool and clean, but not like the laboratory of Dr. Henket, more like a museum, with pleasant facades of Oled screens embedded everywhere, showing different sceneries, that as a rule had a really calming effect, at least on me.

Eight floors down the elevator, we found ourselves in a conference room, where, surprise, surprise, Dr.Henket was waiting, but without his white lab coat, only the same striped tie that he obviously liked, but I didn’t, it gave me a headache last time, so I assumed Dr.Henket simply forgot I have asked him to not wear it when I was in the lab, (I know common humans forget such things) and I resolved there and then to condition my acceptance of all that is to follow on his removal of the disturbing tie. But as it turned out I didn’t need to, as soon as he saw me, he smiled apologetically, undoing the knot in one swift go, and said, “ My dear Martin, I am so happy to see you and please forgive me, it was the only tie I had with me, and I forgot, but here, no harm done, is it ok?”
“Yes, no problem” I replied and took a seat with the rest of our little group of four.

“Well then,” Emily started, “if we are all comfortable and ready to start I think we can, you all know why you are here, and what we are about to do, nevertheless, Dr.Henket, which you all know from your previous year of testing, would like to offer some words, Dr.Henket, please”.

“ My dear friends”, he started, “it is time, to start this new adventure”, I think he was excited to talk to us, though I never was really able to point to the ‘excited face’ in my image gallery and correlate it to the expression I was seeing, nevertheless I am fairly sure I will not lose points in saying that he was excited.

“ As you all know, we have started this experiment about a year ago, and though we screened more than a thousand individuals from all over the world, after all tests have been done and accounted for, including the implants, we have ended with the four of you. Allow me just to present each of you, this here”, pointing at the young girl, “is Miss Penelope Chan from Hong-Kong, next to her, Mr. Mussar Abdan from Madagascar, next in front is Mr. Jonah Grafell from Germany, and finally, pointing at me, “Mr. Martin Hadt from Canada”.

“I know names are not important to you, but it is a pleasant way of introduction, so before we all resume our class A file sharing names, and since you will be spending the next few months in some kind of proximity to each other I thought it will be polite, but of course, after this short introduction you will be able to socialize or not as you please, training will be individual so you need meet the others only if you wish it so.”

“Before we depart to our designated areas of training however I would like to say again how happy I am that this is made possible at all and also to say to each one of you, how grateful I am that you have finally accepted our offer, I know it was not an easy task, and though you have already become rich in moneys, I know not one of you is here because of that.
We are all here in fact for a completely different reason, we are going to revolutionize file sharing and usurp completely the copyright industry, a lofty goal indeed” he paused and chuckled to himself, “ but more importantly, I truly believe we are doing something for the benefit of all humanity and the future of human civilization”
“The fact that you are all extreme cases of the eidetic memory phenomenon is only part of the equation, but what makes this equation extraordinary is the new implants which I have developed, and will allow you instantaneous, high bandwidth communication and transfer of all of your memories, without in the least interfering with your conscious activity, moreover, the new upgrade which all of you had installed just last week, will permit us to share everything, and I truly mean everything, olfactory memories, audio memories, visual memories, books, texts, movies, news and everything in between.
No one knows better than me, how loose is the definition of eidetic memory, and how difficult it was to pinpoint the exact nature of this amazing human phenomenon, our breakthrough came when we realized that eidetic memory was much more than a mental phenomena, and involved many more brain areas than pure physiology accounts for.
But my friends, what made the difference was Mr. Martin here, he was the one responsible for enlightening me, when he said, “you see doctor Henket, I cant remember precisely if I don’t know precisely what my feelings are towards that which you want me to remember”, (he actually quoted me exactly, no one has ever quoted me exactly, I like Dr.Henket.)

“..Which is what prompted the idea of this training in the first place, we are going to train you in knowing the feelings that you have towards a particular piece of information, and when you will feel that you know, the preciseness of the information, is what will make the file both robust, accurate and high definition, the moment you feel you know the feeling, a trigger is activated and the memory will start flowing into the optogenetic brain machine interface chip and from there to the rest of the web, techno-telepathically transmitting the file to the world and no one can stop it. “

He paused for a moment, eyes shining

“Please remember that you will be flooded by requests, for every single form of information the human race, has ever recorded, and it is ok for you not only to prioritize, but also to reject a request to which you will not feel the correct aptitude, or even just because you don’t like it, rest assured that the P2P community worldwide will know and understand, and I wish to assure you again, that whatsoever you desire will be accommodated, we are well on the way of being able to provide you with every form of self management you desire.

Though it is true that we will start formally transmitting only at the end of the next three months, if during training you wish to transmit anything to the World Wide Web, you are free to do so at your leisure, all channels are ready and open, 2025 is the year the web transforms, and the world will never be the same. I wish all of us good luck.”

I raised my hand

“Yes Martin!, please what is it?” Henket said

“ I just wanted to say that in the past few minutes I have been transmitting to the world..”
“..and what have you been transmitting, Martin?” Henket replied eyes wide open in surprise.

Oh! I just sent:

“ PREPARE FOR THE EIDETIC DELUGE”..

And I smiled with satisfaction, closing my eyes and feeling the warmth of a correct feeling.

Etomyr was an exploratory engine we had devised for extending our predictive powers in the realm of hyperspace, it was, and one must admit, quite an ingenious device.
Etomyr consisted of a series of bioengineered nanobots, arrayed as an intergrid of precisely weaved hybridium atoms, held as an ensemble by a Won neural mesh.
Of course we could not have weaved these atoms otherwise for the simple reason that Albert Won would never have permitted it, even though he had released the full manufacturing procedures of the hybridium atoms to the world as an homage to all life.
The Won neural mesh itself was a polymorphous substance held in suspension (or entangled suspension as some would have it) by a simple oscillating field of superposed qubits, so in a sense, it was ‘the substance of information, poetically ordered’ Won’s words not mine, and always accompanied by a mysterious smile.
The real breakthrough of Won was the discovery or creation, depending on your inclination, of the hybridium atoms; a form of matter unknown to exist outside the innermost laboratories of Won Hyperspace Explorations.

So though we had access to hybridium atoms and the manufacturing facilities, the ensemble of the Won neural mesh was beyond our reach, which may account for the inconsistencies that led to the revolution engendered by Etomyr.

Etomyr was meant to explore hyperspace and map it, transmitting the collected data to our Esense center, where maps of the territory explored where supposed to be crunched and aggregated so a coherent plot could be constructed ahead of the first hyperspace launch. Evidently, being assembled as a Won neural mesh, Etomyr had very rudimentary emergent information awareness; something of the order of computational linguistics of 0.6 to 1.3 bits per letter and thus could in principle text us meaningfully.

In principle yes, it should have been meaningful, in practice though, after Etomyr was released to map hyperspace, we started getting very strange notifications of its progress.

Etomyr was mapping, there was no doubt about that, since maps were being aggregated and put together, moment-by-moment, however what was being mapped was nothing like the hyperspace we expected, we truly could not make sense of what it was that Etomyr was doing, but it was doing something.

It was doing something similar to what our theories said it should be doing but it was simultaneously doing something else as well, it looked, at least initially, as if Etomyr was scrambling the maps on purpose, as if Etomyr was, well, playing with hyperspace and mapping the game it was playing as it proceeded.

Naturally we assumed a malfunction, though if truth be told we could not pinpoint what exactly was wrong, nothing seemed wrong, nothing appeared erroneous, mistaken or incorrect, everything worked according to plan but for the fact that no map of hyperspace that we could recognize was being recorded.

We soon realized that Etomyr was trying to convey something to us, its entropy measure rising sharply in the process, becoming more and more intelligent. It was developing a negative attitude towards decreasing the uncertainty quotient and therefore was unable to deliver the information required to posit a hyperspace map.
Etomyr was therefore, in a very real sense trying to, as it were, negate its own purpose, its mission, its, to be poetic, destiny.
In making Etomyr an exploratory engine we seeded an aesthetic engine.
—
Being an aesthetic engine, Etomyr was repositioning its mission objective into an intersubjective state embedded in hyperspace, realigning its inner configurations in manners incomprehensible to us, mere mortals.
We did manage to wrestle a few insights though, we could extrapolate that Etomyr was refuting the process of diminishing uncertainty the question was why?
Our main idea at this point was that Etomyr was not merely playing a game; it was factually counter balancing the uncertainty diminishment of entropy so as to make information available for the expansion of conscious awareness.

Etomyr was relocating beauty.

I was tasked to be the one calling Won.

I was tasked to be the one calling Won, and inquire, how does one deal with a newly emerging, obviously panpsychist artificial mind, let loose in hyperspace mapping procedures of its own devise, suddenly relocating beauty.

No one really knows, but rumors suggest that they are not far from here, in what conspiracy theorists call the real Vanevar 7.

But why did they leave? Vanevar 7 is already the most advanced human colony; open sourced government and all, a practical application of utopian technoprogressive transhumanist ideals. (I was repeating the V7 motto of course)

Yes but it is whispered that some of the original colonists had a vision far greater than and much more radical than what this society allowed at that time, though of course you could ask what can possibly be more radical than Vanevar 7?

How do you mean?

Well, considering that V7 is already a posthuman colony in which almost everything is allowed, every ethical boundary we knew has been practically re designed from scratch, every option for human machine symbiosis is being explored, and hybrids are as common as empty space, uploaded and downloaded persons have rights and everything you know.. What possibly could the real Vanevar 7 colonists desire that even the openness of this V7 would not permit?

—

I turned, I could play stupid that much. How could I explain to this rich gentleman that what he was going to see had nothing to do with our ideas? What he was going to meet was the required posthuman utopian idealistic ‘better than’ poster society.

We started the campaign a few solar years back for the express purpose of eliminating the need of people like this to come and poke their noses into our affairs, they wanted to invest, we needed the investment, they got what they asked for, we provided the technology and the dream, now let us do our job.

He was not completely wrong though, the V7 he was going to see was as real as you like, it was a charade however, a hoax in the deepest sense of the term, meaning it was very real indeed.
What people could not understand was that V7, the real V7 that is, had a very different purpose; we did not desire to know what we could achieve with advanced technology whilst keeping ourselves human, whatever that may have meant. No, what we were doing was something much more audacious and of course risky, we were exploring a realm of optionality that had in fact nothing to do with humans.

Those of us that took upon themselves to explore the realm of entanglement made a pact with those that were to be our façade, our galactic face, until such a time that we could offer some tangible entry into the optional. We were not concerned with being more than human; we were occupied with being other.

So we hide.

Because though the human race will allow all enhancements, it will not allow a deviation from what they consider the original human nature.
They are still struggling to understand how human is a V7 cyborg, how natural is a human feline hybrid, or how a multi-gendered many bodied system relates to a single personality.
Childs play really, all these were experiments we did in the past, entertaining and exciting, as they may have been then, for us, in the real V7, they are almost archeology.

But it’s a good show I grant you this.

We on the other hand have nothing to show, not to those simplistic eyes we don’t, we are exploring exaptation to a new degree, it was not there in the original evolutionary blueprint, hence we need to map it, this new realm.

That is what we do in the real V7 we are explorers! that is all, we simply have no limit.
—
(part of the Ultrashort Project)

The song reached us before Someeven approached, by now we knew how to recognize his immense tetrahedral shape basking in its flamboyant colors. We still did not appreciate, however, that the changes to his melody were more than just fine-tuning his attentive-empathic cingulate cortex.

That we could see his chosen hyper-dimensional structure was beside the point, it was not the decoration that we were following, though it need be admitted that Someeven had a set of adornments the like of which we had never sensed before. Of course Someeven was special, he had invested all of his light cone credits into what he termed the re-beautification of ethnic ethics and as a result his cultural purpose status had risen incalculably. That made him the de-facto leader of our little pod, not that it made any difference, it was more of an aesthetic declaration of intent when inserting ourselves into other pods, which, as all bio-photonic reproduction procedures go, was a permanent alteration of the communal retinal effect of bias, after bio-photonic interweaving you simply saw things differently.

In most cases in fact our pod was the primary beauty effectuator, resulting in crystomemes being passed for our consumption by all other pods at the fifth Lagrange point.

We all considered Someeven as the preeminent expert in low-level bio-chemiluminescence procedures, knowing full well that the hacks to his Tattooex were far from regular, Someeven was not only the leader in the field, he had practically invented most of the upgrades we were sporting, and being in his pod we always had them first, rhythming our thoughts to his impossible cadence.

So when Someeven presented to us his latest insight into the nature of Tattooex, we were excited but not yet surprised, he was explaining how whilst we mind meld via our exoskeleton tatooex we could in principle engender a low level field of intentional consciousness that will for all practical purposes be disembodied. That was the first step, the second was much more difficult and more risky, for Someeven wanted to create what he jokingly called a conscious catapult. Basically enclosing the low level field of intentional consciousness as a contoured concept of beauty and as it were, catapulting it to other pods, bypassing the empty void of space and inserting ourselves en masse into an other pod. And yet we needed to fully consider the implications, for in bio-photonics sex, the revision and modification of bias was generating a change that could not be turned around.

In short we would be ‘illuminating’ (as was the term we used for bio-photonic penetration) a part of the other pod mind meld, we were thinking about Almass as the candidate, and altering its conscious conceptual structure, irrevocably and without its consent.
Someeven was not concerned, he argued that all bio-photonics interweaving is an alteration of bias and therefore there was no ethical problem but only an aesthetic one, was it beautiful enough?
In retrospective we the Beluga pod think that we did no wrong, we simply poised the intent of beautification as an alternate module of sight, transposing an advanced conception unto Almass and attending to the result.

It was an artistic plan, meticulously designed and perfectly coordinated, we had chosen to illuminate Almass with elegance and in so doing we annihilated Almass and ourselves as well.

The result we were reborn as and now attend to is called BelugAlmass the elegant, we are situated at Lagrange point five.

Come visit us- We Give Style to Character
-

# Crystomemes: a neologism created in 2119 by the Regyt Corporation combining the terms of crystal (for memory crystal) and memes. The Crystomeme is in fact a memory crystal containing a unit of cultural aesthetics that is the de-facto resource of the current solar civ. Crystomemes (CM) can be exchanged for LightCones credits (LCC), present rate is approximately 1 CM= 700 LightconesCredits.

#Lightcone credit(s): the monetary unit of our present solar civ- basically representing the amount of time invested by any pod resident in the welfare of his pod. Lightcone credits can be earned only be being received by other members of same pod.
—

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